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An anonymous reader writes "Bringing the real world into the brain scanner, researchers say they can now determine the action a person was planning, mere moments before that action is actually executed. In the study at the University of Western Ontario, human subjects had their brain activity scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while they performed one of three hand movements. By using the signals from many brain regions, the researchers could predict, better than chance, which of the actions the volunteer was merely intending to do, seconds later."

not sure i'd want my arms/legs/hands moving much before I actually intended

"Being able to predict a human’s desired movements using brain signals takes us one step closer to using those signals to control prosthetic limbs in movement-impaired patient populations, like those who suffer from spinal cord injuries or locked-in syndrome.”

Anyone have a link to the actual study, so we can find out what "better than chance" really means? 40% accuracy? 35% accuracy? Either could be significantly better than chance (33%), but neither shows much promise on the "I'm going to read your mind" front.

Unrelated, but why did slashdot decide to change the UI again? It's even less responsive now than their last change!

... better than chance is a pretty general science term that means "Yes, we can do it. Not perfectly, but better than chance."

In the world of science reporting, it means "Eh, not by accident, but not worth writing home about". If they could predict it at 95% accuracy, you bet they'd be reporting it. It's just the way science journalism works.

Unrelated, but why did slashdot decide to change the UI again? It's even less responsive now than their last change!

I think they're trying to put into practice the programming philosophy of "if you take an infinite number of monkeys bashing at an infinite number of computer keyboards, eventually you will produce a Hello World program with a nice bevelled grey box round it."

This has been reported before, I forget what the research was, but "predicting mistakes before you make them" found that the decisions you make before proceeding against your better judgement (omg they found the little angel and devil shoulder imps via the MRI..) This is just the same research again, but focused on movements.

The logical outcome of this research is figuring out how to tap it for cybernetics.

This is far from predicting future actions. I, myself, know what I am going to do moments before I do it. That is because I can think faster than I can act.

It can only predict my actions before I do them, not before I think them. This isn't the start of pre-crime, because that would require planning out your actions before you do. This is not that, and it's not even a step towards that.

This is far from predicting future actions. I, myself, know what I am going to do moments before I do it. That is because I can think faster than I can act.

It can only predict my actions before I do them, not before I think them. This isn't the start of pre-crime, because that would require planning out your actions before you do. This is not that, and it's not even a step towards that.

That's all someone needs to know you're planning on pulling that trigger and to shoot you first. Actually, that's all a COMPUTER needs to know if you're going to comply or not. Say hello to Robocop v2

I'm sure I saw in some BBC program (Horizon?) a claim that it was possible to use this technology to predict a person's action not only before they did it but before they even became *aware* of the decision they were going to make

Either bullshit or quite unsettling.

There is a middle ground in this case between "untrue" and "bad." I've seen the same studies, showing (theoretically) that what we're going to do is already decided before we actually carry out the action, but it doesn't necessarily negate the idea of freewill or anything like that. The mind is not a simple machine, it is incredibly complex and your consciousness only represents, and is only aware of, a fraction of all the activity going on. There are subconscious feelings you don't fully realize you have or don't realize how they will impact certain decisions, there are autonomous responses that will kick in before you get the chance to think about an action, there are trained reflexes that short-circuit the regular decision making process. At least one such study claims that many actions are started "automatically" but higher levels of consciousness then have the option to veto it before it's actually carried out. This is probably exactly how people can literally have second thoughts about actions (although for a lot of people there are unfortunate cases where the conscious mind is a little late and tries to veto the action after it's already being carried out.)

So no, neither our thoughts nor our actions are under 100% conscious control all the time, but that's not anything that anyone with even a basic understanding of human nature didn't know already.

I *am* a neuro-scientist, though I focus more on the visual areas at the back of the brain, rather than the planning area at the front.

This stuff is kinda shiny, but nothing all that new. We can already pick up the brain activity relating to motor actions, both with fMRI and the decidedly more portable eeg. Heck, we can pull this classification trick on the visual system and determine what people are seeing.

The real story here is not being able to determine what people are doing - or even that we can do so

Yes, this allows us neuroscientists to then go on to do more interesting things like design systems to control robotic limbs, but it also enables us to ask interesting questions such as how does experience/learning effect the behaviour of these bits of brain.

One end point of this (amongst others) is to figure out how the brain works enough that we can duplicate useful techniques for use with artificial intelligence.

As some scholar already pointed out, I doubt that your approach works at all. For example, if I give you an excellent scope that detects every electro-magnetic activities of a personal computer, can you build(or design) a personal computer from such data of electro-magnetic activities? A human brain is some orders of magnitude more complex than a personal computer. I bet that you can't figure out a personal computer with such an approach. Your neuro-science approach can't work.

That these signals exist in our brain is no marvel. It is obvious. The news coverage focuses on the wrong aspect of the research. The question is how well their technique works. A device to control a prosthesis better have very high accuracy.

So far, I haven't seen anyone mention one very useful application of said technology: Advanced input devices.
Think about it. If a computer could predict your actions even a second before you do them, then the system can use this data to keep pace with your actions. Who needs a tablet interface, when one can draw on a piece of paper, and the desktop reacts accordingly? What's the point of a touchpad or mouse when one can just move a finger or two over the tabletop next to the computer? Any monitor can

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